But also I fucking hated most of the attempts at meme-y humor and it was very annoying.
Not annoying enough to make me stop reading, tho, so that says something about the rest of the book
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in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:
I, a 34yo man, also read it last year.
I think I forgave the humor because the POV character is a dang teen.
I understand that but... where did this dang teen get that specific style of talking? Where did she even get the titty mags, while we're at it? She grew up isolated as hell surrounded by the most somber, solemn old people in the universe...
I felt like she clashed with the rest of the universe Muir set up. Like a contemporary teenage girl placed in the middle of this space fantasy novel. It took me out of the story so often it was frustrating.
But like I said, the rest of the book was so good I ended up tearing through it and really enjoyed it.
You raise a good point! The Ninth House doesn't even have a militia a noble-ish girl could get magazines and rude ideas from.
But yes, it was the the fastest I finished a book since First Heretic and Blindsight
I hadn't really thought about the magazines before, but, like, before Harrowhark was conceived there were plenty of teenagers on the Ninth. And presumably their families. I can imagine dirty magazines being furtively passed around by teens, hidden in cells, then left there after everyone died for precocious young Gideon to find.
As for the meme style of humor, I feel like after the third book it makes a lot more sense.
Yeah the first few chapters were particularly egregious in that type of humor and it certainly put me off it
I feel like Muir kept shooting herself in the foot with this? She would work so hard to build a tense or gross scene and then deflate all of that with Gideon stopping just short of looking around and saying "well... that happened"
A thing the author has said in interviews is that Gideon is doing what she considers a particularly New Zealand style of forcing a joke out when you're full of seething resentment, and that she doesn't think it came across super well in GtN to fans from elsewhere. Which I'd buy. Someday after the series is done I'll reread the lot of them, and I'm curious how GtN reads with that in mind.
that was more or less exactly how I felt, though I think there were some later instances, maybe in the second book, that definitely landed a bit better.
I'm excited to read the second book because it's not from Gideon's POV, so I'm hoping the narrative voice will be less... juvenile
(But yes, despite my other comments I only enjoyed Gideon the Ninth fine-- it was Harrow the Ninth where I really started loving the series. I know plenty of people who adored GtN and struggled with HtN, though!)
I feel very similarly. One of my favorite series I've read recently, but the memes felt really out of place. Honestly the memes don't don't get any less obtrusive in later books but I came to accept that they're just part of the identity of the series and my negative feelings towards them were dampened.
Yeah it's just the thing that would have taken this book to five stars, but it's definitely at least a four or a four and a half. Excited to read the next ones